Share this:

A plea to think.

When it comes to whole cloth nonsense, one can think of few better examples than David Wolfe. His fear mongering pseudoscience dupes people into believing the most outrageous of claims. It is scary to think that a man who actually believes that without salt being in water it would just ‘float away’. Of course anyone with a primary school education could understand that this is absolutely demonstrable nonsense, but what makes it so that people are drawn to the nonsense this man spews? David Wolfe engages in what’s called pleading to emotion, he makes claims that draws gullible people’s wishful thinking and allows them to believe the completely outrageous things Mr. Wolfe claims. Let’s dissect one of his videos and expose the plethora of nonsense he spouts off shall we? Continue reading The Wolfe Howls Nonsense→

Logic, reason and pseudscientific nonsense

The tripartite definition of knowledge states that propositional knowledge , i.e. knowledge that p , has three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: justification, truth and belief. In short, propositional knowledge is justified true belief. The belief condition requires that anyone who knows that p believe that p. The truth condition requires that any known proposition be true. And the justification condition requires that any known proposition be adequately justified, warranted or evidentially supported.

Reason

The power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically.

I guess we should define logic and a few other terms also

Logic

Reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity. Check or prove the validity or accuracy of,

“all analytical methods should be validated in respect of accuracy”

demonstrate or support the truth or value of.

Truth

That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.

Fact

A thing that is known or proved to be true.

Following through the above list of definitions to reason we need facts, which have been validated as such to show they are true. We have seen historically how a good premise can still present a faulty conclusion. For instance Aristotle concluded that the testicles were weights attached to the voice box because when a man’s testicles dropped his voice deepened. This is obviously not the case which has been verified by biological experimentation which has shown this factually not to be true. Continue reading Logic, reason and pseudscientific nonsense→

Share this:

Facts are Facts!

When the facts and evidence contradicts ones beliefs then you need to change your beliefs because facts are facts regardless of what you believe.

-Fact: We evolved from a common ancestor that we share with other great apes.

Evidence: Fossils found in Africa and DNA studies have consistently shown us this and is even part of the basic foundations of biology.

-Fact: The earth is roughly 4.6 billion years old.

Evidence: Radiocarbon dating and Lead Uranium Dating, this process focuses on the ratio between the number of carbon-14 and carbon-12 isotopes and is very reliable. Lead Uranium Dating method relies on two separate decay chains, the uranium series from 238U to 206Pb, with a half-life of 4.47 billion years and the actinium series from 235U to 207Pb, with a half-life of 710 million years. It can be used to date rocks that formed from about 1 million years to over 4.5 billion years ago with routine precisions in the 0.1–1 percent range. There are also very old zircon rock from Australia that are 4.374 billion years old.

-Fact: The universe is roughly 13.4 billion years old.

Evidence: The age of the universe is determined by using two different methods, by studying the oldest objects within the universe and measuring how fast it is expanding.

Saying “I feel something” or handing someone a religious text does not count as fact or evidence.

Share this:

Jim Hubble has to be one of the worst alternative medicine wackloones/ quacks out there. His solution he has come up with is comparable to industrial bleach,
http://miraclemineral.org/ roughly 28% sodium chlorite in distilled water. MMS is falsely promoted as a cure for HIV, hepatitis viruses, the H1N1 flu virus, common colds, autism, acne, cancer, and much more. There have been no clinical trials to test these claims, which come only from anecdotal reports and Humble’s book.

Sodium chlorite, the main constituent of MMS, is a toxic chemical that can cause acute renal failure if ingested.
Small amounts of about 1 gram can be expected to cause nausea, vomiting and even life-threatening hemolysis in persons who are deficient in glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase. When citric acid or other food acid is used to “activate” MMS as described in its instructions, the mixture produces an aqueous solution containing chlorine dioxide, a toxin and a potent oxidizing agent used in the treatment of water and in bleaching. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has set a maximum level of 0.8 mg/L for chlorine dioxide in drinking water.

Horrible testimonials like:

Mms Helped Autistic Son
Nil from Potomac, Maryland, United States: “Hello, my autistic son dropped his ATEC scores from more than a 100 to 3 in less than a year using MMS. Autism/ASD recovery is possible at any age, my son is almost 16. It is never too late.
Free ATEC score at: autism.com and MMS Protocol info at: mmsAutism.com

Chilling stories of gullible people who are using alternative treatments that are inherently very dangerous to people. There have been suits against this product but people still continue be be duped into this kind of extreme quackery. Children are suffering unnecessarily at the hands of this extreme form of unfounded pseudoscience. –AAPN, best wishes.

As a biology major and skeptic I was immediately intrigued by this, so I began reading through the post — and holy hell… I quickly found myself reading an article that was nothing more than a mashup of fear-mongering claims from misinformation. A lot of the scientific claims the authors made were just blatantly wrong; whether it was about biological processes or chemistry or something else. It’s especially disconcerting because these people are either completely unaware of what they’re talking about and are spreading grossly misleading information through their ignorance, or they are straight up just lying and purposefully creating fear amongst the public against McDonalds. Now don’t get me wrong, they do get a lot of stuff right but I really want to take the time to deconstruct and refute all the bullshit assertions the authors try to maintain in this article. Continue reading “Burger Fear Mongering.”→

Share this:

Religious fundamentalists really do have a habit of wearing down on those of us in the scientific community. They tend to say something nonsensical and disingenuous, then when people point it out they either don’t respond or when they do, it’s often always the same rhetoric some other fool quoted, just in a… different religious context. The typical quote: “I have proof of God and (insert religious passage) and you need to believe because of some outlandish or obscure claim, then insert a logical fallacy or Pascal’s wager, or even better talk about some anecdotal nonsense. Then they claim that because they ‘feel’ something which they interpret as the presence of a god is evidence enough and that we are damned to some ill fate for not believing.” -end typical quote. We’ve all seen it, it’s the same argument every time, just a different religion or slightly adjusted for the circumstances. And they all claim they have all the answers and the rest are wrong. Continue reading The case against creationists and religious fundamentalism→

Share this:

Over the years organic foods have taken the produce aisle by storm, yet is there anything to substantiate this claim? Although most informed individuals already know organic foods are not sustainable to the general population, there are many purported claims to the benifits of organic foods vs. conventionally harvested produce. In classic AAPN style, we are going to debunk the ever living crap out of those.